Cody Bellinger matches Jose Canseco

With his 33rd home run last night, Cody Bellinger ties Jose Canseco, Earl Williams, and Jimmy Hall. The key to this is that Cody hit his 33 home runs in only 389 plate appearances. It took Jose Canseco 682 plate appearances. When Jose burst upon the scene in 1986 he took baseball by storm much like Aaron Judge has done this year. No one had quite seen anything like Jose Canseco in a baseball uniform before. Two years later he would be the AL MVP and when he crushed a grand slam in the first game of the 1988 World Series in the 2nd inning it looked like he would lead the A’s to a crushing defeat of the Dodgers. But he didn’t. That was his last hit in the World Series as he went 1 for 19 as the Dodgers torpedoed the Bash Brothers with pitching and clutch hitting.

his career reached its apex in 1936, when he led the American League in runs batted in with 162, yet he has largely been consigned to historical obscurity. This anonymity is not only due to the reality that his career overlapped a triumvirate of Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, and Lou Gehrig, a triumvirate of future Hall of Fame first basemen who held a virtual lock on the position on the American League All Star teams of the mid-’30s, but also because, at what should have been the peak of his career, Trosky was sidelined with two years of severe migraine headaches, pain so debilitating that he became unable to take the field for days in a row.

From age 21 – 28 Trosky hit 215 home runs. He tried to come back in 1944 and 1946 but it didn’t work out and he ended his career with only 5748 plate appearances and 228 home runs with an OPS+ of 130. He had a short but brilliant career. The man once hit 42 home runs, drove in 162 runs, had an OPS of 146, led the league in TB with 405 and finished 10th in MVP voting.